If there’s one I thing I know it’s you have to have a hot take if you’re going to write a blog so here goes nothing: Green Lantern is better than Wonder Woman 1984.
I’ll let that marinate for a moment.
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Ok here’s my logic: when I watch Green Lantern there’s a few nice moments, Ryan Reynolds has a lot of energy, and Mark Strong had potential as Sinestro. But what separates it from WW84 is I can see how the people responsible for making Green Lantern looked at it and didn’t necessarily know it was bad. I cannot fathom how those responsible for making WW84 didn’t realize this movie was terrible, and try to fix it. (Actually there’s a few spots where you can tell they did where actors looks slightly change during scenes *reshoots*)
Maybe the global pandemic made it impossible to reconvene to do the necessary reshoots to fix it. Maybe the reshoots they were able to do only made things worse and they just gave up. Maybe the studio and the filmmakers wanted two different movies, so we ended up with a mess of a movie that feels like a bunch random ideas stitched together that aren’t fleshed out. Who knows. What we do know is this is a bad movie.
I had a bad feeling right from the opening scene. The movie starts with a flashback to the Amazons having a weird overly CGIed contest in which shockingly a young Diana enters. I’m almost positive this exact thing happened in the first movie, and this was soooooo long. Not a great start.
Then we get a weird slap sticky bank robbery scene, and I knew we were in trouble. Wonder Woman saves the day, but not before we are introduced to the film’s MacGuffin, an ancient stone that grants the wishes of anyone who touches, but with dire consequences. That’s right, WW84 is an adaptation of the Simpson’s monkey paw episode.
I would recommend you do not watch this movie, but if you are planning to be warned the rest of this review will be *SPOILER* heavy.
The biggest problem with this movie, and this is a recurring theme in comic book movies, are the villains. At no point did I fully understand their motivations, or find myself wanting to see Wonder Woman defeat them.
First up we have Kristen Wiig as Cheetah. Full disclosure I do not like Wiig to begin with so I’m a little biased here. Her arc as Cheetah is basically She’s All That except the nerdy girl turns into an evil feline monster in the end. She’s a nerdy pushover who works in the same museum as Diana, and wishes she could be more like her, but whoops she was accidentally touching the monkey paw (er ah magic wishing stone) while saying that. She doesn’t know Diana is actually a demi god, so Wiig is surprised when she starts developing enhanced abilities. And then she becomes an evil cat monster for some reason.
(Here’s another disclosure: I fell asleep somewhere between Acts 2 and 3, and missed all the characters turning somehow, including what caused Wiig to go full Cheetah. Should I have gone back to watch this before writing my review? No because the fact I fell asleep further shows how bad this movie was)
Next up we have Pedro Pascal as Max Lord. Max Lord is very interning character in the comics who has a complicated history with Wonder Woman, so of course this movie ignores all that and just made up a completely new character and named him Max Lord. Pedro Pascal is going for it in this movie. As the kids say he was on one. I think after playing such a subdued character in The Mandolorian for the last two years he was more than ready to cut lose. His Max Lord is a failed oil businessman (?) who is desperately trying to support his family including his son, who was portrayed by a kid who must have won a contest to be in the movie because he sticks out like a sore thumb. Long story short he gets the stone, wishes that he was the stone, grants wishes to the whole world, then his son makes him realize he’s bad and saves the day. Note much like Indian Jones, Wonder Woman does not save the day in her own movie. We did get a cool new meme out of Max Lord. I tried it.
Now we get to the real big bad. The secret villain you never expected…
It’s Wonder Woman. She is the most evil person in this movie. Diana accidentally uses the stone to wish that her long lost love Steve Trevor could return. But of course because it’s a monkey paw there has to be consequences. Steve can’t just show back up. Steve takes over the body of some random guy essentially stealing his life. When he first confronts Diana she’s confused because some random stranger is talking to her as if he’s Steve, but once she realizes it’s actually Steve in this mans body she immediately begins to try and figure out how to fix things, and restore this mans life to him. No? She bangs him and proceeds to just move on as of stealing a mans life to get your boyfriend back is ok? Total heroic behavior. Aldo Steve Trevor doesn’t know what fireworks are and thinks it’s a good idea to fly a plane into them
I’m not going to do the necessary research, but I feel like fireworks were around in Trevor’s lifetime. While I was asleep Diana must have realized the error of her ways because there was no more Steve Trevor. She does encounter the guy he body snatched who does the classic, “This is weird. I feel like I know you.” To which Diana responds, “That’s because you put it on me while my dead boyfriend was living inside you.” Not really but that would have at least been funny.
The true bummer here is that the first Wonder Woman film was pretty good, and Gal Gadot is awesome in the role that seemed almost impossible to cast. A third film has been greenlit so hopefully whatever went wrong here gets corrected for the next go round.
MELTZER SCALE: ⭐️
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